


Visitation

by LiveOakWithMoss



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Gore, Horror, Humor, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Terrifying Tolkien Week, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 03:13:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8429284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiveOakWithMoss/pseuds/LiveOakWithMoss
Summary: A collection of seven ghost stories from Middle-earth.





	1. death & the maiden

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Визиты](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10481028) by [rio_abajo_rio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rio_abajo_rio/pseuds/rio_abajo_rio)



“Be not afraid,” said the woman. Well she might, for her kirtle was thick with blood and Níniel could see the trunks of the trees behind her through her sad and lovely face.

“I am not afraid,” said Níniel, and it was true as well as the polite thing to say. Níniel was weary of fear, and at any rate there were more terrors to be faced in the world than one dead woman. And this woman was very clearly dead – none could be alive with that bone-white spear driven through and through.

Níniel closed her eyes and waited for knowledge to drop behind them. Her own memories having been taken away, she found she had space for the knowledge of others, if she but gave the Knowings time to fall into the openness of her mind.

“Finduilas,” she said, opening her eyes, and the pale woman looked started.

“Princess,” Níniel added, but this was because of the circlet on Finduilas’s brow and Níniel being able to add one to one, not a Knowing sleeting in.

“Yes,” said the Princess slowly. “I was. But now I am dead.”

“It is well,” said Níniel, sitting cross-legged upon the forest floor. “So am I.”

Finduilas bent, her fingers wrapped around the white spear so that it would not shift or jostle, and sat before Níniel.

“Thou art still living flesh and beating heart,” said Finduilas, and Níniel wondered what color her eyes had been before they had grown cloudy and opaque. “I think perhaps that qualifies you among the living.”

“One can breathe and beat and be warm and pulsing and yet not live,” said Níniel. “I woke and all knowing of my life had been taken away from behind my eyes. Without my life, what am I if not dead?”

Finduilas was silent, turning this over. Níniel placed her hands upon her folded thighs and leaned forward, craning to look more closely at Finduilas’s middle.

“I like your spear,” she said, looking in admiration at how it pierced so fine. “Would that I could borrow it.”

“Another time, perhaps,” said Finduilas, and Níniel nodded.

“Do you wish to play Sparrows?” she asked, for Túrin had recently taught her and carved tiles from bone with which to play.

Finduilas smiled for the first time, bright and true.

“That is my favorite,” she said, and Níniel nodded and nodded and went to fetch her bones.


	2. there was a strangeness in the horn

Celegorm sighted down his arrow, leveling the tip at the eye of a doe.

Someone coughed in his ear.

“Hush,” he said, without looking up.

He drew back his bowstring further, and at his shoulder someone started to hum in an annoying, off-tune fashion, a ribald tune that had once been his favorite.

“ _Stop_.”

“You stop.”

“Bitch,” muttered Celegorm and released his arrow, which went wide.

Aredhel laughed, and Celegorm turned on her. “Why do you plague me, wench?”

“Because you deserve it,” said Aredhel, folding her arms over the wound in her breast, the white rags of her dress fluttering in a supernatural breeze. “Given your record, I have decided to haunt both your bow and your cock until I have deemed you worthy of either.”

“About that,” said Celegorm, dropping his bow as a bad job and turning on her. “Your commentary really threw me off my stroke the other night.”

“Yes, that was the intention,” said Aredhel happily, and set about coating his arrows in ectoplasm.

-

For a week, his horses shied when he approached them and his hounds sent up a miserable wailing whenever he entered the kennels.

He suspected the specter riding pig-a-back his shoulders had something to do with it.

He made another futile flail of his arms in an attempt to dislodge her, and gave up as Aredhel simply settled around him like a scarf, her cold suggestion of a chin resting just below his ear. 

“You never used to mind when I did this,” she said, making all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “In fact, I would think you’d appreciated how much lighter I am now - You used to call me ‘fat old heifer’ and ‘stones-in-her-drawers’.”

“That was just to make you mad so we would fight and tumble and I could tear your blouse,” said Celegorm. “Now someone has done it for me.”

Aredhel dropped from his back and he turned to regard her, his eyes falling to the dark wound between her breasts. 

“This,” said Aredhel, “is precisely why you deserve to be haunted.”

And she vanished, but not before she set the hounds to leaping at their kennel doors and his favorite gelding to kicking out a wall. 

-

“I miss you,” he tried one night, as she sat on the foot of his bed and bled onto the furs.

“I loved you,” he said, as she blew cold breath down his neck and made the fingers on his hunting knife falter.

“I failed you,” he whispered, nursing the cut at the base of his thumb, and she stared at him with dark eyes that held not a trace of mercy.

“You did,” she said, and was gone when he reached out.


	3. fight or flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 0\. Illustration by the incredibly talented and generous [runwithneedles](http://archiveofourown.org/users/runwithneedles/profile)!

Twin monsters stalked the heels of Fingolfin’s people. Cold sank its teeth into their bones, and Hunger cast them down upon the merciless drifts.

The companion that roamed just behind the vicious two was Despair, who dug its claws into their hearts and minds and dragged frozen tears down their cheeks so that when they fell, hobbled by Cold and Hunger, they had no spark left in them to rise.

Cold, Hunger, Despair – and their wretched helpmeet, Ill-Luck, who cast a dozen Elves into that dark chasm one day. A dozen lost in a single moment, frozen and broken and seen no more, their bodies never recovered from the depths, their final fate unwitnessed but assured.

Despair roared its delight after that day.

But so too did a new creature.

She brought up the rearguard, a presence sensed but not seen, and while she roared and raged, her quarry was not the marching thousands in Fingolfin’s vanguard. Her prey was fear, and she fought jaw to jaw with woe, and she left footprints in the long night, footprints huge and deep and strangely sweet smelling.

It was Fingon who first saw her. 

He was caught alone and cornered by one of the fierce pale bears who stalked their ranks for the weak and faltering, and while he was strong and steadfast, even the prince on his own was no match for its might. His bowstring snapped in the cold when he tried to draw it, his sword froze in its scabbard, and he was readying himself for death armed only with an arrow in each hand when another beast barreled from the darkness and took the bear by the throat.

Fingon, whose valor lay as much in knowing when to flee as well as when to fight, did not stay to observe his savior. But he recalled later the golden brown of the attacker’s curling fur, the blazing blueness of its eyes –‘Blue as a summer sky, before’ – and a light like that of Laurelin, a light near forgotten on the bleached and blasted ice.

A group of children encountered her next. 

The two adults who had been harnessed to the sleigh carrying them had broken through the ice and vanished, the remorseless seas freezing back over their heads in a moment. The children’s thin voices did not reach the rest of the marching masses, and their loss was not registered for many long hours - Too long, Aredhel said grimly, but wound rope about her waist and set off with her patrol.

When they came upon the children they expected stiff bodies and blackened faces, but instead they found dozing elflings, as comfortable and calm as if they had drifted off by a blazing fire. All were alive and all spoke, when roused, of a great creature in golden white fur who came and curled around them and kissed them with a warm and loving tongue and let them suck of her teats.

“The snowbeast,” they said, and licked each other’s faces with small pink tongues.

* * *

   

* * *

 

The Noldor began to speak of a shining form in the night, one that paced amongst their tents and kept the terrors at bay, a form with a corona of golden fur, howling her protection to the winds.

When food ran low and the hunters’ hands cracked with chilblains and blacked with bite, game began to appear, stacked in tidy, bloody piles. Dead seals at the end of children’s bedrolls, limp ice otters at the tent of the king. Aredhel skinned the seals and fashioned a parka for Idril, who batted around a bladder and sang a nonsense song about snow and beasts and avenging tongues.

Turgon, who had not spoken in so long that they thought his voice had shriveled and faded away on the wind, woke to the sound of his daughter practicing her howls, and smiled for the first time in months.

So it was that the twin monsters of Cold and Hunger, along with their companion, Despair, were driven back and held at bay. And when the company of Fingolfin went first into that battle under the light of the newest moon, it was with the Beast’s cry at their backs, and her teeth in the throat of any enemy who thought to seek safety on the ice.

-

The years spiraled on.

The Noldor blew their bright trumpets and conquered, and spread, and hid.

The snows fell and settled and fell again.

The chill patrols of Angband, in their grey bone armor, looked to the blood in the snow and spat and called her _Abominable_.

Princess Idril of Gondolin, when she felt a certain memory on the chill autumn breeze, looked to the North and smiled and called her _Mother_.


	4. look to your kingdoms

When he had been young and foolish, Gil-galad had played the games with other youths on the Day of the Thinning of Worlds. They had cast the bones and said the words and invoked Námo while standing on their heads, and shivered to see what shades from the Halls might greet them.

None ever had.

“It’s just superstition,” Círdan had told Gil-galad kindly, when he’d caught him upside-down with a pile of grave dust and a mirror. “The dead keep to their halls until rebirth; they do not visit us before then.”

And so Gil-galad had let it go.

But still, when the turning of the year came to bear, and the veil, as story had it, between the worlds grew thin, Gil-galad’s mind turned to the dead, and what they might tell him should they visit. Could they lend him wisdom on the governing of his kingdom? Could warriors long gone provide military advice long lost to his stuffy and complacent advisors? What dead kings and queens might be able to impart to him their knowledge on ruling and the weight of royalty? What answers might they be able to give him?

But Gil-galad was staunch and practical and no longer had any grave dust on hand, so when the Thinning of the Worlds, as the credulous called it, crossed his calendar, he ignored it, and devoted the night to his most hated paperwork.

Gruesome enough, he thought. 

The night grew long. A few times he lifted his head, ears twitching to a skittering in the corner, but rats were a problem to be suffered even by kings. His fat and useless cat drowsed on the bed, and he shot her a judgmental look before returning to his papers, knowing that his habit of feeding her liver from his plate did him no favors here.

The scratching came again, and Gil-galad dropped his quill, annoyed. “You could at least look ashamed,” he said to the cat, and jolted when a voice responded.

“Talking to your pet? How very maiden aunt of you.”

The voice did not come from the cat, Gil-galad decided, after logic returned and had him recognize the sound had come from the opposite direction.

“You were actually wondering if the feline - what do you call her: Pumpkin? Embarrassing - had spoken? You are slower than I remembered.”

The sound unmistakably came from next to the wardrobe, and Gil-galad turned his head swiftly, seeing a flicker of movement there.

“Who lurks in the corner?” he demanded, rising from his chair, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword. 

The movement in the corner resolved itself into a form and coughed. When it spoke again, its voice was more sepulchral than before, and - Gil-galad could not avoid the word - grave.

“It is I,” whispered the specter, for that was what it unmistakably was. “I come to you at last, here at the meeting of the worlds.”

“At last?” Gil-galad kept the quaver from his question, but not the confusion.

The specter bowed its head, drawing back a hood and revealing a crowned brow. “Ereinion. I am your father, drawn from ignominy to your side.”

Gil-galad, his heart thundering in his chest and unnamed emotions crowding his throat, surprised himself by drawing his sword. “Be that true, you have many questions to answer me,” he said, his voice hoarse but strong. “Speak ye verily?”

The ghost looked at him with opaque eyes, and recognition hit Gil-galad with the force of an onrushing dragon. “ _You_? You are my father?”

“No,” said Orodreth, after just enough pause for the tears to rise in Gil-galad’s eyes. He slumped against the wall in a way that was neither kingly nor ghostly, and Gil-galad let out a quavering breath. “Ongoing mystery, that, we talk about it all the time.” Orodreth yawned. “I just thought it would be funny to see how you’d react. Not much else to do for entertainment. I _wanted_ to be sent to pester that little squit, Túrin, but apparently he’s already dead. So what have you been up to? No wife nor children, hmm, interesting. Some odd campaign choices as well, and,” the ghost scanned him critically, “…gained some weight, I see.”

Gil-galad looked to his desk, but there was no sulphur there for the banishing of spirits. 

The sword would have to do. 

-

The servants who removed the demolished wardrobe the next day did not ask questions, either as to why the king had destroyed a perfectly good piece of furniture in a fit of pique, or why he looked so exhausted and browbeaten.

They did notice the fat orange cat looked rather shell-shocked, and resolved to give her some extra liver come dinner. 


	5. something wicked this way comes

She liked the dark, for it did not press painfully on her soft eyes.

She liked the quiet, for it sent no echoes ricocheting sharp off her skin.

She liked stillness, for it let her know exactly when change was coming, through the delicate tips of her toes.

She liked to eat, because food settled warm and heavy in her belly and let her know that she was alive, she was swelling, she was strong, and once a thing was in her belly, she knew it for it was of her, and it was safe.

So she kept to her darkness, and her silence, and her stillness, and grew fat in it, and with each tonne she sighed and felt herself safer.

Then He came to call.

He promised her many eatings, and safety, and an end to the noisy bright dangers that flickered and jostled in the wide world and made her toe-tips ache and tremble and threw off her senses.

He spoke softly, and carried no light, and touched her heavy belly gently and offered her much food, and brought it with both hands to her mouth.

And so she trusted Him, when she should not.

She helped Him with the darkness which was her friend, and sighed in relief to feel blessed shadow on her tender eyes. She wandered further afield than she had in long ages, comforted by the darkness friend, and when they approached the sources of the most painful light of all, He shielded her and put it out, and gave her much light things to put into her dark belly, and she felt fat with gratitude and heavy with stone.

But as she retreated back, happy to return home, He followed, and He carried in His arms something that _hurt_.

These were not the warm and heavy foods He had promised, these were not stillness and security and blessed calm. These were three _pains_. They screamed into her sensitive eyes and jabbed into her soft underneath, and she chittered with distress and went to swallow them, to wrap them in the safety of her stomach, where all things returned to goodness and dark.

By now He was fighting her, with points and rage and loudness, and she moaned in unhappiness, her belly overfull, and wrapped Him and wrapped Him, trying to return to the peace and darkness that were all she had ever sought, but His noise would not cease, piercing her head and blinding her with sound until she cowered back and then more light came, and fire, and everything hurt, and her belly was _ache_.

Thus Ungoliant fled the place that had been her home, and vowed ever after only to trust things that came from the safe darkness of her belly. And so she made many more of herself, and ate only darkness, and sought only silence, and wove until His screams could no longer hurt her, and His treachery could no longer poison her quiet world, and listened no more to anyone from the bright outside, no matter what they offered, or with how many hands they offered it.


	6. backhand of a god

Scorned!

The flash of a thousand galaxies in her eyes, the boom of a thousand imploding suns in her reprimand. The sound still rings in my ears, along with the resounding, mortifying  _crack_ of essence against essence.

I retreat to the shadows, and mull my injuries.

This, this is the final debasement. The final straw on the back of an already overburdened beast, the ultimate indignity that turns me from the light to more tempting, welcoming, encouraging ventures. 

My face _burns_.

This is how little the mighty care for we below them! This is how the Lady of the Arch of the Heavens treats those who offend her lofty sensibilities! I have suffered enough ignominy and insult, I have endured enough belittlement and underestimation; my intelligence and consciousness have weathered enough before the feet of the great.

Enough.

I shall turn myself to the darkness, to the One who will listen and respect. I shall cast myself before His glory and beg His employ. I shall pledge my might to the Dark One whose eyes brighten at my words, rather than narrowing in anger and scorn.

The One who lifts hands of welcome, not condemnation.

The One who touches me with curiosity and calls me _brilliant_.

Not the One, crowned with the stars of the heavens, who strikes my miracle-wrought flesh, whose rings still burn in the tracks on my cheeks, and who calls me _foul_.

I stretch my jaw and cast bitter eyes towards Taniquetil.

They shall witness my defection, and shall live to rue my humiliation. I will watch with grim satisfaction as they learn to regret my secession, and envy the one who has gained me. I shall make sure they know exactly why they have lost my – yes, my _brilliance_.

I shall show them all what The Admirable is capable of.

And what does Varda know from ‘offensive’ anyway, that sheep joke was _hilarious_.


	7. danse macabre

Fingon was singing, low and tuneful, and Maedhros sang back, out of sheer muscle memory.

The hounds howled in the kennels and far down the hall, two children began to weep in their sleep without knowing why.

“Maitimo,” said Fingon, one eyeball dangling from its cord to hang against his shattered cheek. “You look well. It is good to see you.”

Maedhros forgave him the lie and smiled, genuinely glad.

“I am sorry I could not appear to you in better form,” said Fingon sadly, coming closer and touching Maedhros’s cheek with a split, charred finger.

Maedhros’s heart swelled at the familiar rueful tone; he had always forgiven Fingon his vanity. If ever one had earned the right to treasure his looks, it was the High King – even though now his long braids were frayed and burnt, some cropped short and some torn out at the roots, the gold burnished and blackened. Once shining brown skin was now waxen and grey, caked with mud and blood, and open wounds showed gore threaded through with torn fibers of blue and white.

But Fingon had once loved Maedhros in spite of his own ruined beauty, so Maedhros took his corpse into his arms without a care for the viscera or the teeth that fell like acorns upon the floor.  

“Darling,” whispered Fingon, and Maedhros wept with happiness. 

He had not waltzed in centuries, had not hummed a merry tune since the Nirnaeth, but tonight he did both, nimbly stepping around the unspeakable things that dragged on the floor between them.

He bent his head to that of his beloved; so long since he had last felt Fingon’s breath on his lips. He still did not, but he kissed them anyway and never had graverot smelled so sweet. 

He had not felt Fingon’s arms around him in far too long - they were as strong as he remembered, bone-breached fingers digging deep into his skin - and he laughed and sang and swung him around, and Fingon tasted his tears with a black tongue.

Outside, the dogs screamed.

Inside, Maedhros danced. 


End file.
